A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (32 page)

Tonya raised an eyebrow in annoyance and automatically monitored the juice flow to her people.  She found Ellicot’s attitude quite irritating.

Tonya found out why the FBI wanted Zielinski several minutes later.  The information was on the first film from the FBI’s preliminary questioning session, and she didn’t have to watch long.  She had been right when she predicted that the information from the Arm would be shocking.

“Do you remember the first non-Transform you killed after you left the Detention Center?” Leeson said, barely within range of the camera.

The Arm fidgeted uselessly, trying to find a comfortable position.  “Yes.”

“Tell us about it,” Leeson
said.

“
She was a nurse coming out of a hospital in St. Louis, the night I escaped from the Detention Center,” the Arm said, her voice hoarse. “I smashed her head in with a piece of curb.”

“Why?” Leeson
said.  He sounded appalled, not understanding how someone could kill so cold-bloodedly.

“Keaton told me to,” the Arm
said, huddled and shivering.  “She would have killed me if I didn’t.”

Keaton, Keaton, Keaton.
Tonya shook her head at this bit of Arm nonsense, exasperated.

After
a long moment of silence, everyone tried to speak at once.  Leeson overrode the chaos and called for quiet.

“We’ll get to everyone’s preliminary questions,” he said
, on the tape.  “But first things first. Hancock.”  The Arm looked up, miserable.  Tonya noticed her pupils had grown very large. “You were with Keaton when you escaped from the Detention Center?  Remember, give us the truth if you want to get any more juice.”

A large shudder ran through her as Leeson mentioned juice.
“Please, I’ll do whatever you want. Just get me juice,” she said, in her hoarse voice, wrapping her arms around herself tightly.

“Answer the question.”

“I was with Keaton,” the Arm said. “We arranged to meet at midnight that night in front of the Detention Center and she picked me up.”

A
nother ruckus of questions and side comments filled the background, but Leeson cut through the noise.

“How did you arrange this with her?  When were you in contact with Keaton?”

“I met Keaton for the first time in October,” the Arm said.  She hesitated for a moment. “I don’t remember.  October some time.  Mid October.  Agent Patrelle was about to show up and take over and Keaton wanted me to go with her.  Before then, uh, she, uh…  Right.  Disguised, as Larry Borton, the physical trainer they brought in for me at the Detention Center.  Like an idiot, I refused Keaton.  Later, in November, following Zielinski’s instructions, I wrote to her and arranged my escape.”

The voices in the room fell deadly silent when the Arm finished.

“This is the former doctor Henry Zielinski,” Leeson said into the silence. “You and Keaton have been working with Henry Zielinski?”

Hancock nodded, not looking up.
“Yes.  After my escape, Keaton took me to him to pump him for information about Chimeras and she gave him to me, to be one of my things.  I went on my own several times afterwards.”

“Zielinski has been cooperating with the Arms since at least 1966
?” Leeson said.

“Yes,” the Arm
said, in her hoarse voice. “Since long before that.  I never got Keaton to explain in full, but I’m fairly sure Keaton started working with Zielinski about a year after she transformed.”

Tonya, watching, felt like someone had knocked her legs out from underneath her.  Keaton was so closed-mouthed in general
; Tonya hadn’t given any thought to the idea the Arm might have learned anything about Keaton’s earlier dealings with Zielinski.  She took firm control of herself, repressing the urge to look behind her to check on whether some FBI agents waited to arrest her.  Tonya not only had her own dealings with Keaton to worry about, but her own dealings with Zielinski in the period in question concerned Keaton, as well.  If the FBI jailed Zielinski and got him to talk, she would end up in the jail cell next to him.  His hesitations in the phone call Saturday had been a veiled warning to Tonya to watch out for herself, to get the hell out of Dodge.  She had been so caught up in the challenge of breaking the Arm she totally missed an official Secret Agent Zielinski warning.

“Let’s go back to Keaton,” Leeson said, several long minutes later.  “How much contact did you have with her after you left the clinic?”

“I lived with her until September 6, 1967.”  There was no hesitation about this date.

“Where?”

“14752 Davis St. in Philadelphia.  It’s a warehouse,” Hancock said.

Tonya made sure she showed false surprise.  She knew the location of the warehouse already; she had sold the place, unknowingly to Keaton through a third party.

“Look, I really need juice,” Hancock said. “I’m not going to be able to even answer your questions if I don’t get juice soon.”

“Are you threatening me?” Leeson
said, cold.

The Arm visibly wilted.
“No, no.  Just, please, I need juice.  The doctors are wrong, sir.”

“Is Keaton still living at that address?”

“No.  She left after the Chimera attacks last September.”

“What contact have you had with Keaton since September?”

“Nothing but phone calls.”

“Nothing in person?  Not even once?”

Hancock shook her head. “No.”

“Don’t try lying to me, Hancock.  You give us the truth if you want juice.”

Hancock pulled her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around them, shivering. “It’s the truth.  I’m telling you the truth.”  Her long face was pinched and gaunt.

“You’ve got my juice supply,” she
said. “Focus Biggioni wins.  I lose.  I’ll do anything you want me to.  Just tell me what you want and I’ll do it.  You can get Focus Biggioni to torture me more if you want, or you can torture me yourself, but I don’t think you get off on that.  You don’t have to torture me.  I’ll do whatever you want.”

Tonya shivered. 
Her success at breaking Hancock had so completely turned on her that she didn’t want to even think about the consequences.

Leeson didn’t like Hancock’s mild defiance.
“We’ll do what we want to do, and you’ll do what we tell you.  Are you clear, Hancock?”

“Yes, sir.”
Tonya couldn’t tell whether the water dripping down the Arm’s body was sweat or tears.  Or fluid from her seeping blisters.  Why in the hell had the Arm’s rash gotten worse?  She had been healing from it, and they hadn’t moved her from her trashed cell.  A Focus wouldn’t show such a response.

Dammit, she should have listened to Zielinski.  He was right.  She and the doctors here didn’t know what they were doing.

“How many times have you met with Keaton since September 6 last year?”

“None.  None at all,” the Arm
said.

Leeson sighed, frustrated.  Tonya almost expected him to keep pushing the question, but fortunately he knew better.  If he
pushed, the Arm would start telling him what he wanted to hear, whether truthful or not.

“All right, how much contact did you have with Keaton before you left her?”

“I lived with her.”

“How much did you know about her activities?”

The Arm shook her head in a small motion.  “Only observation.  She didn’t tell me much and she lied.”

Thank heavens, Tonya thought.  That meant the FBI wouldn’t believ
e all of what Hancock would tell them regarding Keaton’s activities.  With Hancock’s obvious motive for getting Tonya in trouble, she might be able to get out of this clean.

Special Agent Ellicot broke in.
“If she lied to you, why did you stay with her?”

Hancock answered Ellicot as willingly as she answered Leeson.
“She taught me how to survive, sir.  If I left her, I feared she would hunt me down and torture me to death.”

Leeson opened his mouth to ask another question,
but paused after he heard Hancock’s reply.  He visibly changed what he was going to say.

“What was the relationship between you and Stacy Keaton, exactly?” he asked.

“She taught me how to survive.  I did whatever she wanted.”

“You can do better, Hancock.”

Hancock shrugged, still shivering and holding her knees to her chest. “I cooked.  I cleaned.  I was her punching bag when she was in a bad mood.  She liked to have someone she could express her cruelty on.”

Leeson crossed his arms and looked at Hancock thoughtfully.
“Exactly how much control did she have over you?”

“I did what she wanted.”

Leeson frowned.  “You can do better than that.  Answer the question.”

The Arm’s pinched face creased in an almost smile, painfully bitter.  “You sound just like Keaton.  Do you want me to crawl for you?  Are you going to come out with the little knives and dental tools?  Gut me and leave me for days with my guts hanging out in the wind?  Torture me like Keaton did?  I did what she wanted.  Anything.  Everything.  You’re looking for the clauses and exceptions,
but there aren’t any.”

Tonya raised her hand and the aide turned off the projector. 
She needed space to breathe.  She was familiar with Keaton’s sadistic tendencies, but hadn’t suspected Keaton would be
less
restrained on her student.

Arms were brutal.

Tonya shook her head, appalled at herself for not feeling more disgusted about Hancock’s torture.  What did that say about her?  Tonya had always thought of herself as Keaton’s equivalent.  Keaton would have been similar to Tonya as a Focus; Tonya would have been similar to Keaton as an Arm.  Would she have learned to enjoy the physical power of being an Arm as much as she had learned to enjoy the power she possessed as a Focus?  How much of a monster had Tonya turned herself into, anyway?

The answer was obvious to
a Focus nicknamed the Wicked Witch of the East.  Tonya wanted to go back to being the good guy.  The world wouldn’t let her!  Delia reached over and turned on the lights.  Tonya wanted to scream and shout, piss and moan about the unfairness of it all…but not here, not in public.

They all sat silent for a moment, Tonya, Delia, Marty, Danny, and Pete, plus Dr. Ascot and Dr. Riddelhauser.  Even the doctors didn’t speak.  They sat
, with pale faces.

“Ma’am,” Marty said eventually, breaking the silence.
“Did I understand that correctly? This Arm was Keaton’s
personal victim
for ten months?”

Tonya didn’t answer. 
She had nothing to say.  The whole thing was a gamble, a gamble Keaton had played to type and didn’t tell Hancock much about her life.  A life having, as one tiny footnote, far too much cooperation with a certain Tonya Biggioni.  A gamble Tonya suspected she had lost.

“Turn the projector back on,” Tonya said.
They weren’t even close to done and the information was something they all needed.

Ten minutes later, Leeson hit another bit of paydirt, more of Tonya’s gamble going down the rathole.  “So, Carol, why did you shout the name of Focus Biggioni when the Transform volunteer was shown to you?”

“Isn’t this obvious?  Focus Biggioni is the big Focus expert on Arms.  She and her Network of Focuses want to grab control of the Arms, but us Arms aren’t in the least bit interested in being grabbed.”

“Ahhh.  The Network,” Leeson said, purring.  “Tell me what you know about the Network.”  In the Network’s infancy
, the Focuses had arranged the breakout from Quarantine right under Leeson’s nose.  Leeson would like nothing better than to find some way to destroy the Network.

The Arm coughed repeatedly.  Much later, Tonya would realize she had been laughing.  The Arm read Leeson and sympathized with his desires.  “Hank – that is, Henry Zielinski, was my Network contact.  Keaton dealt with the Network and Focuses on occasion, but whether
she dealt with them via threats or deals I never found out.  Knowing Keaton’s personality, I suspect she blackmailed the Focus bitches.  As far as I could tell, they deserved everything Keaton might throw at them.”

“Why?”

“After the Chimera named Enkidu raped and nearly killed me, I accidentally juice sucked a Transform who belonged to a Focus.”  The Arm sounded like each word she spoke took an effort of will.

“Let me get this straight: you encountered a male Monster” as the Feds termed the
Chimeras “and afterwards you killed a tagged Transform.  Why was this an accident?”

The Arm nodded, her head unsteady.
“I was wounded and nearing withdrawal.  I fainted at point A, and woke up at point B standing over a Transform’s corpse.  I knew I was in deep shit and wanted to make things right with the Focus.  I had a number to call in case of emergencies.”

“This Focus Biggioni?”

She shook her head. “Hank didn’t give me
her
number.  He didn’t trust Focus Biggioni with my life.”  Tonya wanted to celebrate.  Hancock hadn’t explicitly mentioned that Tonya had been Keaton’s Network contact.